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| Photo by Molly |
— Satish Kumar
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Satish Kumar: Let Peace Fill Our Heart, Our World, Our Universe
As Satish Kumar Turns 90, His Radical Idealism Is More Important Than Ever
I have long loved Satish Kumar and the ways that he illuminates the sacred, our interconnectedness with all of life, and what it is that truly matters. May we all be inspired by this beautiful, radiant, wise human being. — Molly
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| Photo credit: Ennio Cameriere |
‘What we do to nature we do to ourselves. If we pollute our water, we have to drink it. If we pollute our air, we have to breathe it’
By
In a quiet corner of coastal Cornwall far from Westminster, the brightest eyes the colour of polished conkers sparkle from a dark corner of a lovely old stone farmhouse. ‘Our crisis is not climate change, not economic growth, but aesthetics. We have lost our sense of balance, proportion and harmony. We don’t use our heart and our hands,’ says Satish Kumar, editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine and founder of Schumacher College, and who this year will be celebrating his 90th birthday. Kumar has been calling for a radical reimagining of our relationship with the natural world for over six decades, arguing that we need to shift our emphasis from economic growth to human and planetary wellbeing.
His influence stretches far beyond the eco-chamber. When Jane Goodall interviewed Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever who transformed the corporate giant by placing sustainability at the core of its business model, he quoted Kumar. ‘When they teach economy, they should also teach ecology,’ he said, and, ‘humanity comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth’.
‘Satish Kumar has changed the world, because he is the catalyst for other people to do things. He articulates possibility, and paints a picture of what could be, filling you with optimism and hope,’ says Louise Chester, who introduced Polman to Kumar. Chester, a high-flying financial analyst who was overseeing billions of funds before she founded Mindfulness at Work, a not-for-profit which coaches compassionate leadership to CEOs, lists a global collective of influential changemakers mentored by Kumar. This includes activist Vandana Shiva, who established seed banks across India to resist the commodification of agriculture. ‘I really don’t think I would be the person I am without Satish. I have a very close relationship with him but so do thousands of others,’ says Chester.
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| Satish Kumar: ‘We consider ourselves owners of nature. If we seriously want to address the root cause of global warming, we have to shift the paradigm from ownership to relationship.’ Photo credit: Ennio Cameriere |
Kumar’s views are shaped by experience, conviction and courage. Raised in a Jain family in India, he scandalised his family by running away from a monastery to join the Gandhian movement, realising he could better spread the message of peace in the wider world. In 1962, aged 25, he embarked on his famous 8,000-mile peace walk, inspired by outrage at the imprisonment of the 89-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell for demonstrating against nuclear weapons. He walked from Gandhi’s grave in Delhi to Washington DC delivering packets of peace tea to the four nuclear capitals, urging leaders to pause and think. Advised by his mentor, Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s embodiment who spearheaded land reform in India, to take no food or money, he entrusted himself to the hospitality of strangers. Being vegetarian wasn’t easy among Hindu Kush tribesmen.
It was when he was on his way home after the walk, in 1966, that he met the economist E F Schumacher (after whom the college was named), author of Small is Beautiful. Schumacher persuaded him to become editor of Resurgence & Ecologist (formerly Resurgence magazine), arguing that there were many Gandhis in India but there would only be one in England. Kumar spent the next four decades shaping one of the most influential environmental magazines in the world. He created a platform for pioneering ecological thinkers like James Lovelock, Arne Naess, Fritjof Capra and Joanna Macy, and challenged readers to confront difficult questions around sustainability, economics and population growth long before such debates entered the mainstream.
‘The problem is our attitude,’ he explains. ‘We consider ourselves owners of nature. If we seriously want to address the root cause of global warming, we have to shift the paradigm from ownership to relationship.’ He contrasts Descartes’ duality, ‘I think therefore I am’ with the Sanskrit phrase So Hum, ‘you are, therefore I am’, a philosophy rooted in interconnectedness with the universe outside of ourselves. He calls for a reframing of most aspects of modern life: leadership, education, economics, farming, planning and our relationship with nature, in that when we are killing the planet, we are killing ourselves. He advocates more respect for farmers; that schools should nurture imagination as much as intellect; that children should be ‘eco-literate as well as computer literate’; and that communities should care for one another rather than depend on centralised government.
It’s to nature that we return again and again in our conversation. It’s his spiritual practice, his mentor and his respite. He describes the rolling Cornish coastline and its changeable weather as a metaphor of life and reminds us of the generosity of the soil. ‘Soil is very forgiving. It does not ask if you have a Visa card. Out of one seed comes 50 tomatoes. ‘When I started writing about renewable energy in Resurgence in the 1970s, people said we were “naive, idealistic fools in cloud-cuckoo-land”,’ but what seemed radical then feels only too relevant now after decades of biodiversity collapse, floods and fires, polarisation and blinkered leadership. ‘Our bodies are soil transformed,’ he says, ‘so what we do to nature we do to ourselves. If we pollute our water, we have to drink it. If we pollute our air, we have to breathe it.’
I catch up with Kumar between appearances at the Oxford Union and Darwin College, Cambridge, where he is discussing alternative leadership styles. In June, he spoke at Eton College. His 90th birthday tea party will be hosted by Frieda Gormley, co-founder of the B Corp House of Hackney (which put nature on its board), who persuaded the Oxford English Dictionary to include humans in its definition of nature. His retreats based on his books Radical Love and Soil, Soul & Society are sell-outs. Other books include The Buddha and the Terrorist, No Destination, a memoir about that two-year peace walk, and his ninth book, Peace is Possible, has just been published.
In 1964, Satish Kumar set off on a peace walk from Delhi to Washington
He believes modern society suffers from a failure of courage and trust. ‘We want the world to be nice, but without standing up for it,’ he says. ‘Mahatma Gandhi talked about “[being] the change you wish to see in the world”.’ For Kumar, that means teaching young people resilience, compassion and respect for difference. He worries about a world increasingly shaped by division and intolerance, where people seek to destroy opposing viewpoints rather than understand them. ‘We have to dream and to imagine that a slightly less imperfect world is possible,’ he says. ‘We need to train young people to be statesmen, not politicians, to embrace diversity, not to make everyone like ourselves.’
As the sun falls over the Cornish coast, Satish Kumar turns on a light. The 89-year-old peace activist is no longer sitting in the shadows but glowing with vitality. He leans forward, those brown eyes shining even more brightly. ‘You know, Annabel, I know I sound like an idealist. But what have the realists done for us? Realism is overrated. Realists haven’t given us anything except climate change and wars, and they don’t even win them. It’s time to give the idealists a chance.’
Please go here for the original article: https://www.countryandtownhouse.com/culture/satish-kumar/
Chris Hedges: Don Corleone Trump - Read by Eunice Wong
As always, Chris Hedges is exemplary in his wisdom and knowledge, integrity and courage, awareness and profound commitment to bringing us the darker realities and truths too often missed, minimized, denied, and distracted from by the mainstream media — while also being essential for us to be empowered to know, understand, and act upon. Please also know that Chris Hedges has been warning us about where we find ourselves at today for decades. Which is exactly why mainstream corporate funded American media never features him. And I do mean never. Chris embodies a strong and unrelenting threat to the neoliberal and now fascist status quo. Which is what makes him so dangerous to the most wealthy and their devastating corruption and unquenchable greed. And so vital to the rest of us. — Molly
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| The Don – by Mr. Fish. |
Trump’s White House runs a mob-style extortion racket that will bankrupt the country the way Trump bankrupted his casinos.
By Chris Hedges and Eunice Wong
I visited Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City the day before it closed, in October, 2016. The casino had two huge white gates flanked by 2-ton white, cast-stone elephants. Its entrance was topped by an array of 70 turquoise and teal fiberglass minarets and a dozen gold-tipped domes. A neon sign with red and gold lettering read: “Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort.” A lighted fountain in front of the glass casino doors was decorated with two rows of six white-and-gold urns.
The Trump Taj Mahal, New Jersey’s tallest building and the world’s largest casino, cost $1.2 billion to build. The opulent suites, when they opened, were named after historical personalities — Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Napoleon and Cleopatra. The suites cost around $10,000 per day. Trump, whose name and image were plastered throughout the casino, employed his familiar hyperbole to call it the “eighth wonder of the world.” The casino operators were instructed to answer incoming calls with the words: “Thank you for calling the Trump Taj Mahal, where wonders never cease.” The waitresses wore “harem girl” outfits.
The casino went through bankruptcy five times.
Trump is doing to the country what he did to the Taj Mahal. His administration is operating well beyond its means with a budget of $7.4 trillion for fiscal year 2026, against projected revenue of just $5.6 trillion. Trump’s idiocy has embroiled the United States in an endless and unwinnable war with Iran, which may tank the global economy. He is set to cut health coverage for 15 million people, along with food assistance and other basic needs programs. He has terminated the jobs of thousands of government employees. He has shut down USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. He gutted Voice of America and vows to close the Department of Education. He withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement (twice). He continued the suspension of funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which had begun under the Biden administration. He canceled thousands of U.S.-funded international development projects. He erased government datasets and climate-related web pages. He slashed the budgets for renewable energy initiatives while revoking federal carbon and pollution regulations.
His scorched earth policies, which are dynamiting the foundations of the republic, are accompanied by a culture of corruption and deceit that is unmatched in American history.
Trump, whose officials face accusations of insider trading and whose family has made more than $1.4 billion from crypto-related ventures since taking office, shamelessly profits from the fusion of unregulated cryptocurrency-based prediction markets and politics pioneered by gambling apps, such as Polymarket.
Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is a major investor in Polymarket, where he sits on the advisory board. He has an estimated net worth of $400 million. He also serves as a strategic advisor at Kalshi, which gave him equity in the company worth some $300,000 — now estimated to be worth millions. Kalshi recently announced it will allow users to bet on whether the FDA will approve individual drugs as “safe and effective.”
Trump’s Truth Social is developing a prediction market called Truth Predict. His administration sued Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois in an attempt to block these states from regulating prediction markets. Truth Social also launched a $100,000 per month service offering quicker access to Trump’s market manipulating posts — a thinly disguised version of insider trading.
The White House, replicating the mob-style shakedowns of Atlantic City’s casino culture, demands huge payouts from corporations and billionaires in exchange for political favors and deregulation. The Wall Street Journal writes that Trump has amassed a slush fund of $800 million for pet projects, including his ballroom, presidential library, super PACs and political issue committees.
Trump’s chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed “The princess of darkness,” collects the payoffs with the blunt pitch “The boss wants this money.”
The nonnegotiable demand is lifted from the playbook of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the head of the Bruno-Scarfo crime family, whose extortion racket collected millions from Atlantic City construction firms, businesses, bars, restaurants, unions – which saw their health and welfare funds looted – and casinos. And, just like the mob, once is never enough for the Trump crime syndicate.
It always comes back for more.
Trump, who like most mobsters is accompanied by a much younger goomah — his latest being his executive assistant Natalie Harp — has a long history of mob-like retribution. He issued executive orders targeting law firms that previously employed attorneys who investigated him. The firms lost security clearances and access to federal courthouses. Scrambling to placate Trump, they sheepishly succumbed to his demands.
When I arrived at Trump’s casino, the 22-space tour bus terminal was empty. Most of the 12 restaurants in the casino were closed. The casino’s arena, seating 5,500 people, had shut its doors.
The Trump Taj Mahal, like our republic, was about to die.
“When I walked inside the Taj, glittering Austrian crystal chandeliers, which cost $14 million each, dangled over the softly lit interior,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour. “Many were missing strings of beads. The walls were covered with mirrors. I looked out at rows of gaming tables, blackjack tables, roulette wheels, and three thousand slot machines that twinkled with colored lights. The slot machines emitted beeps, hums, and dings of various pitches. They stretched over an area the size of three football fields. The gambling floor was almost empty. The dealers stood in front of vacant, felt-covered tables. Most of the gamblers who slumped in the cushioned chairs in front of the slot machines were elderly and haggard. They robotically pulled down levers or pushed square buttons. They stared blankly at the spinning screens in front of them. One slot machine generates between $200 and $300 a day for the casino. The dedicated gamblers are given courtesy drinks. Housekeepers occasionally enter rooms to discover the corpses of elderly men or women who spent hours drinking more alcohol than their bodies could absorb. It is not uncommon for slot players to wet and soil themselves.”
“The seventeen computerized check-in desks near the entrance were empty,” I continued. “A lone clerk stood behind the long counter facing empty rope lines. Toilets in the bathrooms, adorned with Carrera marble, were covered with plastic bags and had signs reading ‘Out of Order.’ I walked along the soiled and worn carpet through long, deserted, and poorly lit corridors on the upper floors. Semicircular beige wall sconces, some of which enclosed burned-out bulbs, were placed every few feet on either side of the hall. The sconces were dirty and cracked. The ceiling had brown water spots. The air smelled of mold. Three quarters of the 1,250 rooms had been mothballed. The casino felt like a ghost ship.”
Gambling, like Trump’s sham university and his $TRUMP memecoin, is about selling escapist fantasies. It is about preying on people’s despair. The spinning reels on the slot machines, for example, are an illusion. They do not slowly run out of momentum. They are programmed to appear that way. Computer chips determine the outcome the moment the button is pushed or the lever pulled. Virtual reel mapping ensures that a jackpot symbol appears above or below the payline. The player has the impression of almost winning, spurring the gambler to bet more money.
Trump from his earliest days as a real estate developer was enmeshed with the mob, including his cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn represented Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, and Carmine Galante from the Bananno crime family. Trump was schooled by Cohn and others in the art of extortion, blackmail, threats and graft. He has, throughout his career, surrounded himself with mobsters, grifters and sycophants.
Joseph Weichselbaum, a three-time-convicted felon who was eventually imprisoned for trafficking marijuana and cocaine, managed Trump’s helicopter fleet. The helicopters ferried high rollers to and from Trump casinos. These high rollers could get anything they desired, from sex with escorts to cocaine. Weichselbaum’s easy access to drugs was probably an asset. When Weichselbaum was awaiting sentencing, Trump wrote to the judge that he was “a credit to the community.” The trafficker received a three-year sentence, although he served only 18 months. The couriers who physically delivered the drugs for Weichselbaum got up to 20 years. When he was released from prison, Weichselbaum moved into Trump Tower with his girlfriend.
Trump’s casino opened in 1990 with a concert by Michael Jackson. It was an extravaganza built with $820 million of unsustainable debt, including the issuing of $675 million in junk bonds at a 14 percent interest rate.
Marvin B. Roffman, a casino analyst at the Philadelphia investment firm Janney Montgomery Scott, told The Wall Street Journal that the Taj Mahal would need to make $1.3 million per day to meet its interest payments. No casino had ever brought in that much money.
“The Taj was doomed from the start,” I wrote. “Trump soon had to service interest rates of $95 million a year. He was able to get new loans for a while and then went bust. It was a brief and giddy moment of insane excess. But it was good for his outsized brand, even if it showed an atrocious lack of business sense. Trump had borrowed money at high interest rates and lied about the rates to regulators. Trump dumped the losses on stock and bondholders, who were fleeced for more than $1.5 billion. Numerous local contractors and suppliers, never paid by Trump, went bankrupt.”
Trump made out like a bandit. He put up little of his own money. He shifted personal debts to the casino and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. His casino employees collectively lost millions of dollars in retirement savings, along with their jobs. His business debts were off-loaded on his investors.
Trump owned three casinos in Atlantic City and one in Gary, Indiana. The Trump Plaza and the Trump Taj Mahal casinos were shut down. The Trump Marina, his third casino, was sold to Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta. Fertitta, currently Trump’s ambassador to Italy, renamed it The Golden Nugget. Trump’s casino in Indiana, a 340-foot vessel called the Trump Princess, declared bankruptcy in 2004.
All failed because of Trump’s insatiable greed and mismanagement.
Trump is doing to the nation what he did to the Taj Mahal. He is harvesting and extorting the organizations he oversees for personal profit, while the rest of us are left bereft amid the ruins.
__________
This article was read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.
Text originally published August 3, 2026.
Please go here for the original article and reading: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/don-corleone-trump-read-by-eunice
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| This is one of the numerous times that I saw Chris speak when he came to Portland. His books also line my bookshelves. I am inspired to continue to recommend the work of Chris Hedges to everyone. https://chrishedges.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/chris-hedges/ |
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Pema Chödron: Cultivating Kinship
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| Photo by Molly |
Cultivating Kinship
Whatever you are doing, take the
attitude of wanting it directly or indirectly
to benefit others. Take the attitude
of wanting it to increase your experience
of kinship with your fellow beings.
— Pema Chödron
EXCELLENT — Cristina Breshears: Inheriting and Perpetuating the Normalcy Of White Supremacy and Racial Terror
WOW! Thank you, Cristina Breshears! This is so excellent, so deeply important, so incredibly relevant to the collective tragic and violent patterns that we see playing out on repeat over and over again! That is, if we are courageous enough and care enough to see.
I deeply appreciate and respect Cristina’s courageous journey of inquiry and bravely and wisely following the threads wherever they may lead. This process is what I believe and experience is one of breaking our hearts open and leading us ever more deeply into fierce love and caring for all of life.
May we all be inspired to look and learn and love and care more deeply about all of our sisters and brothers everywhere. — Molly
What Story Do These Fragments
Tell Together?
For the past several years, I have spent hundreds of hours following my grandfathers through four centuries of American history. I’ve not been looking for villains, but I am finding patterns.
One deed meant very little by itself. Or one sermon or military record or newspaper clipping or family story. None of them individually explained a life much less my family. But eventually the documents began speaking to one another. Small repetitions became larger currents. What first appeared to be isolated incidents slowly revealed an inheritance.
I think we all know that patterns become habit. On average, it takes about sixty-six repetitions to build a habit (this is why I fail at my New Year’s Resolutions). Habit becomes tradition. And tradition becomes culture, it becomes etched into our national story.
My grandfather James probably never woke in the morning asking himself how he might uphold white supremacy. By the time he was born, much of it had become ordinary. His own father, my great-grandfather Joshua, had belonged to a generation that helped build that racial order through war, racialized terror, Jim Crow, and the mythology of the Lost Cause.
But Grandpa James inherited something different, something quieter and easier to overlook. He inherited its normalcy. White supremacy was already baked into Oklahoma law. It was writ large across political campaigns throughout the 1920s-1970s. And I remember the segregated hours at the swimming pool in that Oklahoma sundown town -- in 1972. I remember discovering the Anadarko lynching postcard tucked deep inside our family Bible.
None of these things announced themselves as extraordinary to the people living among them. They were simply the atmosphere. Accumulated dust particles that could lead to a dust storm.
That is how cultures perpetuate themselves. Not only through explicit hatred, but through an accumulation of inherited assumptions, familiar symbols, and habits so commonplace they become almost invisible.
Perhaps that is why certain images have unsettled me this year. Pantone's Cloud Dancer (I wrote about that earlier this year). A Target Halloween costume reminiscent of a minstrel performer. The Sydney Sweeney "Good Jeans/Good Genes" campaign. And now Converse advertisements whose imagery has prompted many people to see echoes of nooses, Klan hoods, or chilling photographs from America's long history of racial terror.
[Re the Converse print advertisement and commercial: the print ad is a composite of different historical traumas. It is a stark, high-contrast silhouette composed of a geometry of hate and empty shoes. The specific framing in the commercial with dangling jewelry and hands reaching upward closely mimics horrific historical photographs from the American South such as infamous Mississippi lynchings. Westerns and southern gothic films frequently use this exact framing to build tension right before a hanging like in the classic films like The Ox-Bow Incident, or dark thrillers where a character reaches up to a makeshift noose in a moment of despair.]
I don't know what any designer intended. No one does. So yes, some of these associations may be accidental and my own overactive mind being saturated with the acts of my great-grandfathers.
The images that are conjured may arise from simply careless choices on the part of the marketing team. But none of these examples passed through only one set of hands. A lot of time and a lot of attention from many, many people went into these choices.
The truth is, individual examples can almost always be explained away in isolation. But after spending years tracing my own family's inheritance, I have learned that history rarely repeats as a single event. It repeats as a pattern. And patterns deserve our attention.
Cultures often reveal what they have not fully examined through the symbols they continue to reproduce. That doesn't mean every image is secretly communicating hate. It means symbols carry memory whether we intend them to or not.
A noose is never just a rope in America. A hood is never simply a hood. "Strange Fruit" is never merely a song. ((There have been no fewer than ten incidents of “Strange Fruit” in this country this year.)) History leaves emotional fingerprints on ordinary objects. These are part of our cultural memory whether advertisers intend them to be or not.
When the same visual motifs keep appearing, especially at a time when our public discourse is increasingly comfortable with dehumanizing language and our institutions are under strain, dismissing every concern as "people are just looking for racism" misses something important. Cultural meaning isn't created only by artists or advertisers. It's created by history and by the people who have lived through it.
Intent matters. But impact, I think, matters more. My father taught me this without ever realizing it.
After he died, he left behind a box of maps, courthouse records, yellow sticky notes, penciled arrows, photocopies from archives scattered across the country. For years I thought he had simply collected boring genealogical facts. Now I think what he was really leaving me was a way of paying attention.
One arrow on a map means very little. But ten arrows begin pointing somewhere. One family story can be dismissed. A hundred years of repeating stories become inheritance. And four hundred years of perpetuating these patterns (even unconsciously) become who we are.
I think my father was trying to understand our family in the years before his death. In leaving me with his genealogical archive, he unknowingly taught me how to read history differently.
History leaves breadcrumbs. Years spent tracing my grandfathers have changed how I see the world. I no longer dismiss recurring symbols simply because each one can be explained away in isolation. I have learned to ask a different question: What story do these fragments tell together?
Standing on the shore, the ocean appears calm. Each wave looks separate from the last. Orderly. But beneath the surface, powerful currents move in directions we cannot see. They gather strength not because of one wave, but because of thousands moving together.
History feels much the same. One advertisement is probably just an advertisement. One slogan is probably just a slogan. One image may be coincidence. But when the same motifs return again and again, when they echo our deepest national wounds, when they stir memories we have not yet fully confronted and reckoned with, it is worth asking what current we are drifting into.
The opposite of forgetting is not remembrance. It is attention. And the work of history is not simply to remember what happened, it is to recognize when old currents begin moving beneath new waters.
Because undercurrents are easiest to escape before they become strong enough to pull us under. We do not honor history by memorizing it or by performing patriotism . We honor it by recognizing its patterns before they become our habits. It is a civic responsibility.
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." ~ Maya Angelou
Intensified by Fossil Fuel-Driven Climate Crisis, ‘Godzilla-Level’ El Niño Smashing Records Ahead of Peak
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| A firefighter douses flames as they push toward homes during the Creek Fire in the Cascadel Woods area of unincorporated Madera County, California on September 7, 2020. The El Niño event of 2026 is expected to cause a variety of extreme weather, including dry conditions in some regions and extreme rainfall in others, in 2027. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images) |
“As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels,” said one scientist, El Niño “occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”
By Julia Conley
Although “El Niño comes and goes,” as one climate scientist said of the naturally occurring warm-weather phenomenon on Monday, experts are in agreement that this year is different—with meteorologists already recording a temperature rise of 3.07°C in the Pacific Ocean, putting it at a statistical tie with November 2015, when El Niño caused the ocean to warm by 3.08°C.
The temperature rise is not expected to peak until November and December, when an average of 14 models examined by Zeke Hausfather of Carbon Brief and Berkeley Earth found that a temperature rise of 4.1°C is forecast.
The event has been underway since June, Hausfather wrote, and has been gathering strength “faster than any previous event on record.”
Scientists typically track the strength of El Niño—which leads to heavy rainfall, higher global temperatures, and other extreme weather as warmer Pacific waters are pushed to the south—using the Niño 3.4 anomaly, or ONI, which determines how much hotter the central Pacific is compared with a 30-year rolling average.
A temperature rise above 2.0°C is considered a “very strong” El Niño, and scientists and policymakers are already calling this year’s event a “super El Niño,” with some experts using the terms “Godzilla-level” and “jaw-dropping” to describe the weather conditions that can be expected in the coming months due to the warmer climate.
As Common Dreams reported late last month, planetary heating driven by fossil fuel emissions is intensifying El Niño, while the naturally occurring phenomenon can in turn worsen the impacts of the climate emergency.
In the last 40 years scientists have recorded a 16% increase in the strength of El Niño events, according to a study published in Science last month. They’ve also gotten 36% stronger than they were before industrialization began.
The “double whammy,” as The Guardian called it, could make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded, blowing through heat records that have just been set this year—and that have been linked to the deaths of people around the world from extreme heat and flooding.
“This event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London told The Guardian. “So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security, and water stress.”
Despite the fact that El Niño predates the human-caused climate emergency, Otto said, “as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”
This year’s event is likely to be the most intense El Niño in 1,000 years, reported to The Guardian, with hotter and drier conditions already linked to deadly wildfires in Indonesia and crop losses in Central America and the Caribbean region due to drought conditions. Rice production this season is expected to fail in Indonesia, according to the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.
As the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months approach, southern Africa and Australia are at heightened risk of wildfires and droughts as well. Meanwhile, cocoa production could be damaged by extreme rainfall in parts of South America.
“All strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter—and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too,” wrote Hausfather at Carbon Brief. “If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.”
In California on Monday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in an effort to prepare communities for El Niño’s impacts in the coming months, which could include coastal flooding and heavy snow in mountain regions.
Hausfather noted that strong El Niño events like those that occurred in 1997 and 2015 were also “associated with hundreds of billions of dollars in damages globally.”
“This event,” he told The Guardian, “is leaving those past ones in the dust.”
Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/el-nino-2026
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